Happy Friday (and some Hawaii pictures)...

So Rick is on his way home from Chicago, after his first week at the new job. We're both really hoping the house will sell quickly -- me because I'd really like to find a place to get settled in Chicago, and I hate it when the house is so quiet at night (Piva is great to have around, because she sleeps on the bed with me every night... Allegro has always been so much more of an independent cat -- she just sprawls out on the couch by herself)... and Rick wants the house to sell quickly because in the meantime, he has to live out of a hotel three or four days a week. His boss said something to him about how most sales reps seem to gain about 20 pounds when they move out to the field -- because they tend to eat out a lot when they're meeting with accounts. This is NOT something I wanted to hear... I've gone to much effort to change the way we eat and how much exercise we get, and it's been beneficial to both of us. We're really gonna have to be careful about adjusting to this new life in Chicago... all that Chicago deep-dish pizza... and great restaurants... and Ghirardelli's...

Our first open house is Sunday, and I think I've pretty much done as much as I can around the house to make it appealing to prospective buyers. (Except for that horrifying empty dining room...) The one thing I still have to do is organize the closet -- I have a whole pile of clothes and shoes in the middle of the closet that I want to donate to Goodwill or Salvation Army. But I think the house preparation was just generally easier this time than it was with the last house -- because we got rid of so much stuff when we sold the last house, and haven't had time to accumulate much more in the last few months. So that IS one "plus" to moving into a new house and immediately selling it a few months later... :)

I've been so busy this week that I just got around to downloading all my Hawaii pictures to my computer today... so here are a few more pictures from our trip:

Zoom in of the beach at sunset from my hotel balcony...

And this was the view right outside the door to our hotel room... see the rainbow?

A sand crab... this is kind of a bad picture, but it was nighttime on the beach -- if you went out to the beach after dark (when it was usually devoid of people) and waited very quietly and without moving too much, sand crabs would start crawling out of the sand. To be honest, it was rather creepy -- you could see them crawling around in the dark, and if you made any kind of sudden movements, they would dive right back into the sand (where, apparently, they reside during the day, when people are lying on the beach -- totally oblivious to the army of crabs inches beneath their feet... think about THAT next time you're trying to get a tan...)

Sunset in Lahaina...

At one of my favorite places in Hawaii -- the Maui Ocean Center...

Me, Eric D. and Debbie looking at the fish...

I love these jellyfish -- they have them in a dark room with a blacklight shining on them, so they're flourescent... so cool...

Sea turtle saying hello...

They have a plexiglass tunnel you can walk through, and all the fish are swimming around you, like you're right in the middle of the ocean. They also have a few sharks in there -- because it's always fun to pretend like you're swimming with the sharks... (it's less fun to ACTUALLY swim with the sharks...)